One of the biggest ironies of my life is that shoes made for adventure activities are invariably more hospitable to fragile feet than high heels. I demand a life where I can wear both something cute and nondestructive to my toes! There is no reason I can’t rock climb all day and hit the bars all night other than that high heels tear big holes in my feet and make it impossible to climb tomorrow.
When I first started climbing mountains, I quickly learned how cotton kills. It’s great to wear cotton in an Oklahoman summer (>100 F), but if you want to go up any hill your cotton socks will rub your feet into all kinds of pain never imagined. I still remember hiking up a small hill in southern Cali in my new boots and cotton socks and how all the boys thought I was a huge wimp until we sat down on the curb outside Zankou’s to eat our shawerma and I took off my boots and socks and revealed my huge gaping wounds. I’ve switched to Smartwool and REI and Danskin now high performance socks for general mountain use, but I will never forget that lesson.
Of course, cotton generally kills because you wear it in the hot summer days of the desert and die at night when the temperature drops so low your water bottle freezes solid unless you sleep with it inside your sleeping bag. Fortunately, I never had to learn that lesson, although I have had a few encounters with frozen water bottles in the morning. (So sue me, the socks lesson stuck, the water bottle lesson is still a work in progress!) For that matter, I still haven’t learned to pee when it’s so cold your urine freezes before it hits the ground. I’ve been operating in desert environments and opt to empty my bladder only when the sun is up!
Now that I’ve shared way too much information, it’s time to move on to high heels, the shoes that were the original intent of this post.
I learned a few lessons from climbing. I tape my hands before tackling a big wall. Now I tape my feet before any time in heels. Usually I just tape everything in sight. My feet are fine in rock climbing shoes, my hands are usually fine unless I tackle a problematic crack. I tape anyway.[1]
I forgot to tape my feet my first day at JPL. Big mistake. I had big holes in my feet at the end of the day and had to bum a ride to the visitor’s lot. That screwed up my trail running for a month, which was long enough to throw me off it, well, for over a year.
I can’t tape for guitar, and my fingers bled when I picked it back up after a 6-month thesis hiatus. Morgan says liquid skin[2] is the solution, and I believe her for guitar, but for feet I think it’s a bigger issue.
Take my one of my friends, a great person all around, as an example. She climbed Half Dome with me, despite her cotton socks and common running shoes. When we reached camp she used up all my tape and gauze and general medical supplies and I had to give her my flip flops. She could barely walk the next day anyway. All I had was a very large open blister on the bottom of my toe. Cotton kills performance, at least.
I’ve often regretted going on short day hikes without carrying along tape and bandages and extra high performance (non-cotton) socks. The worst was doing a short 1-mile in, 1-mile out hike to Bumpass Hell with my little sister in her cute flats when she was what, five years old? She got blisters on her heels and I was so upset with myself for not bringing my usual supplies to teach her how to make sure this would never happen to her again. I was upset with the Half Dome experience because I had supplies on-hand and I was a bad trip leader and did not stop the group and force them to check for hot spots every half hour for the first hour or two of the trip. I was upset with my first day at JPL experience because I KNEW better and still screwed it up.
So, what’s the point of this post?
The point is you’re not really allowed to tape your feet before going out on the town in high heel sandals, but you’re expected to wear footwear fancier than trail runners anyway.[3] For all women who have experienced gaping wounds and blisters from cute but inadequate footwear, let’s just tape anyway. Maybe someday one of us will eventually work up enough courage to market a line of cloth medical tape in varying shades to math skin tones from ebony to alabaster, just like makeup. It would come in widths varying from “pinky toe” to “full heel coverage,” and come in cute little powder compact or lipstick-shaped packaging. If anyone is interested in this line of products, let me know.... maybe we can get something rolling here!
[1] Tape is my solution to all of life’s challenging situations. Medical tape is for troublesome biological issues like preventing blisters or covering the inevitable paper cut or semi-major gash obtained from apparently forgetting how to walk up stairs. Electrical tape is for small jobs when I want something in the lab to really stick and have time to track down a pair of scissors, duct tape for larger jobs and when I’m too lazy to find the scissors. Masking tape is when I want to be able to remove the tape without damaging a surface or want to label something with a Sharpie, clear tape when I want paper to stay put on other paper, and packing tape, well, packing tape is so useless and widespread that I kind of think it should be outlawed.
[2] A type of super glue. Maybe I’ll write a whole other post on the virtues of super glue.
[3] I have confirmation of this! A colleague of mine noticed all the tape on my toes one evening at a conference and made fun of me for the rest of the evening and into the next day….
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